Benefits Of LMS Reporting We Tend To Overlook
Reporting gets a bad rep a lot of time. It’s seen as a boring and time-consuming task, but something that needs to be done so everyone is up to speed on how your business is performing.
The truth is, if reporting is something you don’t look forward to doing, then you’re probably not doing it right! Reports should be exciting because they give you a detailed insight into different areas of your business and give you hard evidence to base future business decisions on! They’re a completely vital task, and you need to treat them as such!
We’ve picked 4 of the overlooked benefits of LMS reporting you might be missing, which may be leading you to not get the most from your reporting. Read on, below, to see what you’ve been missing, and I’m sure you’ll never dread doing those reports again!
1. Stay Updated At All Times
You may think of reporting as something that should be completed every month or every quarter, but the truth is you should compile a report whenever you feel you need updating about a particular part of your business. Why wait until the end of the month if you need a clear picture now? You don’t have to stick to a pre-determined schedule!
LMS reporting is really easy to compile whenever you need it, because all the information relating to your students is online and stored within your Learning Management System, and therefore will be updated automatically every time something changes, like someone purchasing a place on a course, a student completing a module, or a new eLearning course being upload to your LMS.
This means if you need a clear picture of how things are going in the middle of a month, you’ll be able to get a snapshot, without having to trawl all over the place to collect all the data you need—it will already be right there for you! All you need to do is pick what you want to report on and create the report, and you’re good to go.
2. Compare Data With Other Training Styles
If you run other training courses apart from eLearning, such as blended learning classes, or classroom-based sessions, then you’ll obviously want to report on all the classes you offer to get a clear picture of how your business is performing.
Your LMS reporting system will allow you to create separate reports about your eLearning offering, which means you can see how it is performing on its own, and then also compare the data to reports you have created for other areas of your business, to see which areas need some improvement.
If you have something like a Training Management System which you LMS can connect to, it will also make it really easy for you to produce larger reports which will encompass all of your learning offerings in one place. This type of report is great for giving an overall picture of your entire business, and not just one specific section.
3. Customize Reports To Fit Your Needs
When you’re reporting on your business, the last thing you want is to have to use pre-defined reporting fields. These will only produce reports that show what your reporting system thinks you want to see, as opposed to the things you really need to see. Creating reports which pull data directly from your Learning Management System means you should be able to pick exactly the data you want to report on, so your reports are always customized to what you need to see.
This also means you can break your reports down into lots of smaller reports, so you can focus on one area at a time rather than having to pull all the data into one report, and then try and draw intelligent conclusions from a mass of a data!
You want to make reporting as easy as possible, so you can make smart business decisions from your findings, and only reporting on what you need to see will make this a lot easier.
4. Spot Problems Early
As we said above, you don’t have to wait till you hit a certain point in your reporting schedule before you compile a report on a certain thing—you can do it whenever you need some more detail on something.
This can be particularly helpful if you see a problem arising, and you want some more information on it right now, rather than waiting weeks for your next report to be produced.
This means you can get in there and start fixing a problem right away, as waiting without probing into what is going wrong could mean the problem is in a much worse state by the time you get around to reporting on it properly. This could already have done lasting damage to your business, so it’s important to be able to address these things as quickly as possible.
